


I've Nothing at All to Remember You By

by GayvinFree



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Ghosts, Injury, M/M, Minor Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 09:59:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1775059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GayvinFree/pseuds/GayvinFree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the quiet moments, the apparition came and reminded Steve of all he had lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've Nothing at All to Remember You By

**Author's Note:**

> Let's just pretend that TWS hasn't happened yet. And won't.   
> Set sometime after The Avengers  
> The formatting may be slightly off due to the fact that the device which I am posting this from barely supports this website in its browser

“You don’t even care, do you? Typical. You really only cared about yourself and those you’d lost long ago. You never cared about those you still had to lose!”

Steve was shaking, pain and exhaustion leaving him weak. It had been a long time since he had felt this way. He shouldn’t, though. Perfection, right? He shouldn’t be tired…

He couldn’t stand. His left leg was crumpled beneath him, his other leg stretched out before him on the dusty floor, his torso propped up against a cement wall. A bare light bulb flickered, hanging from the cracked ceiling by a few frayed wires.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I swear. We tried to look for you-”

“You’re sorry? That’s what you always say. Sorry. You say sorry then you go and do it again! What about the other one? Your dear friend? He’s dead too and it’s your fault.”

The apparition was trembling with rage. He was slightly transparent, just so you couldn’t quite see the colour his image held. His hair was dark though, his eyes flashing. Were they blue...or brown? Hazel? The hue was faded to barely a tint. The concrete wall behind the phantom seemed to have more colour than his eyes.

Steve felt his stomach drop. Already the guilt had been ripping him apart, but now? Hearing the words out of his mouth was like knives were tearing into his mind.

“What else can I do?” The soldier glanced up at his fellow soldier. “I can’t change the past. All I seem to be able to do is run from it.”

The man that Steve once knew chuckled lightly, all anger seeming to leave him. His voice melted back into its usual sarcastic tone, but Steve could almost sense the remnants of the vision’s outburst still writhing beneath the surface of his skin. “No, not you. If anyone, I’ve had the most experience with that. That’s all I ever did.”

“You weren’t running.”

A bemused half-smile curved the man’s lips. “How so?”

Steve shifted against the wall and hissed as his left leg was jostled and sent a jolt of pain up his body. “You never ran. You faced your past and you beat it.”

“Your past always catches up with you. You should know that more than most.”

Suddenly, the steel door embedded in the wall across from Steve is pounded on, loud clangs that reverberate throughout the room, almost shaking the floor in its intensity.

Steve took a deep breath and tried to mentally prepare himself for whatever was behind that door. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the man dissipate into the air. Vanished completely. Just like he always did.

The door gave one last shrieking shudder and with a blast of light and heat, the door was eviscerated in a show of explosive breaking and entering.

“Long time no see, Captain,” Natasha Romanov steps calmly through the rubble, with a handgun raised as she scans the room.

Steve gave a relieved sigh from his spot against the wall. “About time you got here. It’s been weeks.”

Natasha made her way into the concrete space and kneeled down next to Steve, inspecting his injured leg. “We got a bit side-tracked. Agent Sitwell was determined to have us go on a mission in Brazil before this. Horrible idea.”

“Well isn’t this a party,” Clint pokes his head into the blown-out door frame. “We should hang out here more.”

“I’d rather not.”

~~~

Recovery was slow.

Then again, it could be worse. 

Thanks to the serum's healing factor Steve only had to spend a few hours in the SHIELD infirmary after his leg was set and the broken tibia wrapped in a plaster cast. He was instructed to stay off of his leg for 10 days, after which time he should be completely healed.

Steve felt like he was even more out of the loop than usual. He had only been imprisoned for three or so weeks but so much had happened in such a short span of time that it seemed to Steve that he might as well have missed another seventy years.

~~~

(Six weeks later)

“I still feel like we shouldn’t be here,” Bruce mutters, tossing a phone from one hand to the other. “It’ s just...it feels wrong, somehow.”

“He said...it was made clear that we could use this place even if anything happened,” Steve paced the floor of one of the many living rooms the Avengers Tower contained. “There’s no point in feeling guilty about it.”

The hardwood floor creaked beneath Steve’s feet. The noise was grating in the silence that enveloped the room. Steve was aware that Bruce was still standing quietly by the chair in the corner, idly tapping around on his phone.

Suddenly, a memory rose in Steve’s mind, triggering him to break the quiet.

“J.A.R.V.I.S.?” Steve addressed the general direction of the ceiling. He always felt awkward while speaking to the AI, who seemed to live in the very walls of the tower.

“Yes, Mr. Rogers?”

“Was there anything left for me in the workshop? I thought it was mentioned at some point before...what happened."

Bruce glanced up from his phone, eyes a bit wide. No one had really mentioned the events that transpired before Steve was captured. Apparently it had become a forbidden subject after an intense argument about said subject led to a couple rooms being destroyed and a helicopter vanishing mysteriously. Steve wasn’t there for it, so that was all the information he had about it.

“There was.”

Steve was already turning away from the patch of floor he’d been pacing and trying his best to appear calm as he moved towards the elevator. He had a feeling that whatever was left for him in the workshop is what he’s been looking for.

He offered Bruce a quick valediction before impatiently pressing the elevator button several times, as if that would help the elevator get to floor 37 faster.

Within seconds though the metallic doors whirred open and Steve stepped inside the lift, selecting his number and waiting a few more seconds as the elevator began to descend.

“Why didn’t you say something before?” Again Steve felt odd, like he was talking to himself, maybe.

“I was instructed to not alert you of what Sir left for you unless you specifically asked. I believe Sir said something about wondering if you cared enough to check.”

All was silent except for the barely-there hum of the lift’s mechanics.

~~~

“Took you long enough.”

He was back, just a little fainter than before. He was sitting atop one of the worktables like he belonged there, turning a glass box over in his hands. He was swinging his legs and kicking the drop leaf with his heels like a bored child.

“It wasn’t like I knew I was supposed to ask J.A.R.V.I.S. about it,” Steve muttered, running his hands along an old hologram projector. It flashed to life and the apparition placed his glass box onto the table and jumped off of it, rushing to Steve’s side and working the hologram with ease. Files were brought up in a blink of an eye. Videos, audio, text boxes.

All about the Chicago Incident.

~~~

"Tony, you can't go in there!"

"I have to. Civilians are trapped and the building's gonna collapse soon. If I try I could hold up the girder that is about to give way. We'd have just enough time to get everyone out. We won't if we keep wasting time arguing! Just trust me for once, okay?”

“You’ll die if that collapses,” Steve spoke through his earpiece as he ushered another civilian away from the rubble that was the result of another skyscraper's lower walls crumbling. Steve could see the flash of red and gold that was the Iron Man suit, hovering outside the unstable tower. 

“No, I won’t, and if I do this right the building won’t fall. For once in your life just trust me!"

Steve watched helpless as a flash of red and gold disappears into the hole blasted into the lower walls of the high-rise.

Clint’s voice crackles out from the speaker in Steve’’s ear. “We’ve got more doombots coming in on LaSalle and Goethe is clear for right now. Should we engage?”

“Yeah,” Steve’s mind struggles to deal with both the battle that is going on around them and the insane risk that Tony is taking.

“While you and the spider do that, I’ll work on- oh that might be a problem,” Tony pauses, his voices wavering into a tone of uncertainty. Steve could barely hear Tony’s shaky breaths through the com. “How...how can this...”

“What’s wrong?”

“There must be a gas leak from the damage that J.A.R.V.I.S. didn’t pick up. They’re all...all the civilians are...oh my god. Wait wait no don’t do that-”

A deafening blast and Steve is near-blinded from the explosion that tears the building apart.

~~~

The apparition studies the data on the hologram, eyes narrowed slightly as he reads what caused Tony’s- and hundreds of other people’s- deaths. He shakes his head, almost as if he disapproved of the entire incident. With a swipe of his hand he shut down the hologram and leaned across the counter so he could pick his glass box back up. “Well, that was interesting.”

There was a pause, and the vision pulled one of the sides off of the box and took out it’s contents. Inside of it had been an old arc reactor.

Engraved on it were the words 'Proof Tony Stark Has a Heart'. 

“This is the last time I can be here,” the spirit brought the engraved arc up to eye level and inspected it. “My link to this plane of existence is weakening.”

Something akin to panic wells up in Steve’s chest. “You can’t leave. I’ve...I’ve nothing at all to remember you by.”

The vision becomes fainter by the second. With a small grin he handed the arc to Steve and gave him a mock salute. “You can have that...and I’m sorry I blamed you about James Barnes...and me dying. It wasn’t your fault. None of it was.”

“That doesn’t matter right now! Tony, you have to stay-”

“Bye, Cap.”

The last remnants of Anthony Edward Stark faded away for the rest of eternity.


End file.
